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Toddlers' Vocabulary Gets a Boost From Non-Verbal Clues

by Joanne Van Zuidam on June 25, 2013

Joanne Van Zuidam

About the Author

Joanne Van Zuidam writes about all things parenting — from getting your pre-baby body back to getting the kids back to school. She strives to practice what she preaches with her own daughter. Her work has appeared in <em>Better Homes and Gardens</em>, <em>ShopSmart</em>, <em>First for Women</em>, and <em>Family Circle</em>.

About the Blog

WhatToExpect.com supports Word of Mom as a place to share stories and highlight the many perspectives and experiences of pregnancy and parenting. However, the opinions expressed in this section are those of individual writers and do not reflect the views of Heidi Murkoff of the What to Expect brand.

Summary: New research may help parents better communicate with their kids to make it easier for them to build solid language skills before starting school.

The clues that parents give toddlers about words can make a big difference in how deep their vocabularies are when they enter school, say researchers at the University of Chicago.

Their paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that by using words to reference objects, parents can greatly improve their toddlers' vocabulary skills.

Preschool vocabulary is a major predictor of school success, said lead author Erica Cartmill, a postdoctoral scholar at UChicago in a university statement. What's more, she says toddlers' vocabularies vary greatly in size by the time they enter school.

Cartmill and her colleagues also explored the quality of non-verbal clues to word meaning during interactions between parents and children learning to speak. For example, they found saying "There goes the zebra" while visiting the zoo helps a toddler learn the word "zebra" faster than saying "Let's go to see the zebra."

Differences in the quality of parents' non-verbal clues to toddlers (what children can see when their parents are talking) explain about 22 percent of the differences in those same toddler's vocabularies when they enter kindergarten, researchers found.

For the study, researchers asked 218 adult participants to guess 50 parents' words from (muted) videos of their interactions with their 14- to 18-month-old children. They discovered differences in how easily individual parents' words could be identified purely from this socio-visual context.

According to the report, the differences correlated with the size of the toddler's vocabulary three years later.

And while previous research has shown that parents with higher income and more education typically talk more to their children and accordingly boost their vocabularies, that advantage didn't show up in the quality research.

"What was surprising in this study was that social economic status did not have an impact on quality. Parents of lower social economic status were just as likely to provide high-quality experiences for their children as were parents of higher status," said co-author Susan Goldin-Meadow, the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at UChicago.

Although there were no differences in the quality of the interactions based on parents' backgrounds, the team did find significant individual differences among the parents studied. Some parents provided non-verbal clues about words only 5 percent of the time, while others provided clues 38 percent of the time, the study found.

The study also found that the number of words parents used was not related to the quality of the verbal exchanges.

Researchers added that parents who talk more are, by definition, offering their children more words, and the more words a child hears, the more likely it will be for that child to hear a particular word in a high-quality learning situation.